Recently Basil Jellicoe (BF 1912) was featured in the Church Times. The piece there is well worth reading and has a number of interesting pictures. The following is part of a sermon I preached in the Haileybury Chapel at the end of a Lent Mission.
Basil Jellicoe is now pretty much forgotten, but at the time of his death he was famous.
Just after the First World War Jellicoe had come down from Magdalene Oxford, been ordained and appointed as the Magdalene College Missioner, responsible for a Christian Mission to the area round S. Pancras station in London supported and funded by members of his college. It was an area of slums: dark alleys, stinking tenements, jumbles of dwellings with no sanitation, no light and providing hardly any shelter.
Seeing the terrible housing conditions Father Jellicoe insisted that the spiritual duty of the church for the souls of her children must extend to a physical duty to their wellbeing and specifically to their housing.
Jellicoe cajoled the owners; raised the funds; demanded support; lobbied politicians; worked to change opinion, employed the press – Gaumont films made a news reel that was sent round the country and the world – and generally made himself a nuisance to anyone and everyone to get things done. It was fabulously successful. Things were done and the whole area was transformed.
His work spread beyond to confines of his own parish. He was called on to develop his new concept of Housing Associations in the Isle of Dogs in London and in other cities in the nation. His idea spread round the world, and he is the father of social housing.
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| Jellicoe (R centre in biretta) with the Metropolitan of Thyratyra |
Father Jellicoe was not a social reformer. He was a Gospel preacher. Once he described the beginning of the work with the housing. “We wanted money for these building schemes” he said, “So whom do you suppose we went to? Well we went first to a poor paralyzed woman who hadn’t a penny, who couldn’t use anything but her lips, but who knew how to pray. That was the beginning of everything.”
It was costly what he did. It was costly to others who had to give up their preconceptions and their prejudices and be carried along by him in his enthusiasm for the gospel. But it was also costly for him. Twice he had breakdowns under the pressure of the work. He drew strength from his daily offering of the Body and Blood of Jesus at the altar in his church; he organized a prayer guild to sustain the mission in prayer, and he drew on the power of the scriptures in his spiritual warfare. But it cost him nonetheless.
Someone who knew him well wrote of him, “I can see him now, pacing round and round the room, a soul on fire within a rather faded cassock, his eyes ablaze with what I can only call a fury of faith for the fighting of ancient wrongs, his heart aglow with affection for all sorts and conditions of men and with visions for their greater good. I wondered how long it would take for so keen a flame to burn out.”
Basil Jellicoe died, burnt out and exhausted, aged just 36.
Perhaps we would say that to be like that is wrong: self destructive, and foolish. But among those who knew him there were those who, reflecting on what he had achieved said that had he not been like that he would not have done what he did. The cost of discipleship sometimes must be paid in those terms.
What inspired Jellicoe was a vision of a reality beyond this world. He lived his life in the light of the resurrection. He was not concerned that he might burn out because he considered that this world is not all there is. Not that that made him cease to care about this world. His whole work was focussed on something as material as housing. But even that was not an end in itself. He wanted his people to have good homes because he wanted our earthly kingdom to reflect as much as possible the eternal kingdom, in both material and spiritual things.
Now I know from many conversations this week that many here are seeking for some proof – some sign of our own – to reveal this glory, if there is any glory to be revealed. I will not seek to call down fire from heaven to make such a proof. But I will point you to a fire. There is a fire of faith that burns in the souls of those – the Marthas among us - who have seen and known the resurrection. It is a fire that shines out more or less brightly to the world, and which if you choose to take the risk you too may see. Sometimes as in the case of Father Jellicoe it is a fire that burns inside a dirty cassock; sometimes it burns in the eyes of a child; sometimes in the life of dedication, sometimes shining in some unexpected place. For a few this week there may have been little stirrings of it half unacknowledged in yourselves.
Faith in the sign of the resurrection allows us to take risks with our lives. In the end it enables us to do things which otherwise we would fear to do, and the very yearning we have for what lies beyond this world enables us to make so much more of this world.
We all have one thing in common with Basil Jellicoe. He worshipped in this chapel. He was in BFrere and his name is carved up in letters of stone just over there. Here he knew God. Here God comes to you and to me. The truth is that whether you know it or not, God has already kindled His fire in your heart. Will you smother those sparks: or will you take the risk with me and allow the fire to consume you?
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